> The target was no ordinary shoplifter. He was part of a network of organized professionals, known as boosters, whom CVS had been monitoring for weeks. The company believed the group responsible for stealing almost $50 million in products over five years from dozens of stores in Northern California.
The story isn't about people selling stolen goods on Amazon. It's about organized theft operations. One way to stop theft is to reduce the ability to sell stolen goods, but that infringes on ownership rights of a large number of people that want to sell things online. I'm sure large corporations would love it if you can't buy their goods second hand.
At the end of the day, protecting property rights is a job for the state. Since it sounds its being organized, the criminal organization might be exploiting recent changes in sentencing and prosecution:
> Retail investigators blame changes in sentencing laws in some states for an uptick in thefts. In California, a 2014 law downgraded the theft of less than $950 worth of goods to a misdemeanor from a felony. Target recently reduced its operating hours in five San Francisco stores, citing rising thefts.
The SF city government seems to have realized that there's another way to make crime "go down": refuse to prosecute for anything, ideally make it pointless for the cops to even show up, until people stop bothering to report crime. Wow, shoplifting is at record lows!
We're approaching a strange post-empirical world where the right chart or graph can be used to justify any public policy, and often changing how the data for the chart is collected, analyzed and presented is easier than solving the issue. The collective anecdotes of thousands/millions of people can be dismissed because the chart says otherwise.
Disagree that crime in your neighborhood has dropped? Just because your car has been broken into and your neighbor got robbed doesnt mean there's a trend. Anecdotes arent data. Do you have a source for that?
I will never not share Goodhart's Law when the opportunity arises: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". You couple that with redefining what counts as a 'crime', and bam, you get the situation SF is in right now.
That is a bad idea. It leads to vigilantism, or even worse, local organized crime steps in with attendant protectionism racketeering.
With the American System each year failing a larger and larger percentage of the population, while the upper elites continue to hoard wealth and starve the government, then it makes more and more poor people turn to illegal means to make money.
Much like drug gangs in the inner city. However this will also turn into the nasty spiral of gang-controlled neighborhoods chasing out legit economic activity and becoming even more poor.
What we need is a decent civil society. But America is an oligarchy and they've figured out how to use social media to block any meaningful populist progressive reform by organizing a sufficient opposition with astroturfing and fake news.
The felony theft limit for Texas is $2,500, but their retail establishments do not report massive shoplifting sprees. Clearly there is more than misdemeanor/felony classification at work here.
but in Texas, how likely is the staff or the store owner to be armed, and actually confront you? No way that would happen in California.
I keep thinking of this event that happened to me in the UK, where laws are equally useless at preventing theft, and staff are just powerless to do anything about it. I chased down a shoplifter. I cornered him in an alley. He stopped, looked at me, and this brief conversation took place. (and nobody ever believes me, but I don't care; this really did happen)
Him: What are you doing?
Me: I'm chasing you
Him: why?
Me: Because you're a fucking thief!
Him: (confused)...nobody's ever done that before.
Me: (shocked) ... well, I AM, so fucking run!
He dropped the bag (which contained mostly expensive meat and cheese and some other expensive-ish items - apparently really common theft targets) - and ran off. I took the bag back to the store.
Now, I didn't give a shit about a 100 pound loss to Tesco, but if we've completely given up on the rule of law, I'm not sure that's a society I'm happy to live in.
My guess is it's the same situation as Seattle; Prosecutors in California refuse to prosecute these cases, meaning the cops refuse to waste time trying to apprehend them.
Here's an excellent clip about a famous criminal living free in Seattle that happily expounds on his illegal activity: https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=868
I'm pretty sure in CA it's that police do not respond to calls for anything less than felony theft.
So it creates a situation where you can walk in the store, grab what you want, and then walk out with out having the police called or anyone legally allowed to stop you.
That's a good point. I don't think the felony theft limit is the only consideration the deters organized theft. One obvious difference between Texas and Bay Area is Texas has a lot of guns.
> In TX can You Legally Shoot & Kill a Shoplifter? The short answer is…not unless they somehow injure you in the process of committing the theft, making it a robbery. “During the process of committing the theft” would include while trying to escape with the property... One thing that is UNIQUE to Texas is the ability to use deadly force to protect property, even if you are not in fear for your life.
Even though I doubt CVS security guards are trained the shoot shoplifters, the preception that this is a possibility would deter low level criminals tasked with shoplifting
One of my observations coming from Bangladesh, where policing is pretty inadequate, is that criminal law is really there to prevent the growth of organized crime. So you have to think about crime as a system not in terms of individuals. Harsh punishment may not deter a given criminal. But it may well make it hard to recruit dozens of low level people to engage in low value illegal activity that adds up to something significant.
That doesn't seem to be working so well with drugs. We've filled prisons with people engaged in low level illegal activity but we don't seem to have made any dent in illegal drugs. In fact, probably the opposite.
I'm concerned about lawlessness, but if the only alternative is that $950 theft is a _felony_ that's messed up. This seems more like a case of not being able to deal with crime than lax sentencing.
A simple solution is that the amount should be be based on the value stolen by the entire organization. RICO laws work much the same way with the mafia.
So, if your crew stole $10,000 worth of stuff over the past year, you’d be looking at a $10k theft charge even if you individually only stole $50 of merchandise.
Nobody will risk prison for $950 of stuff. If you make it basically a ticket, then you can easily get dozens of people to be able to steal a meaningful amount of stuff.
The fact that Amazon will fence stolen goods for a thief is absolutely part of the story. Used to be a whole criminal enterprise to be able to make money off of stolen goods. Now, anyone can start shoplifting and turn that into cash through FBA. If you can find someone selling something for cheaper, you can turn around and sell it online via Amazon FBA. Turns out, stealing is a great way to drive down costs (assuming no morals). There's absolutely a wider societal discussion to be had, but lowering the bar on how to make cash via shoplifting deserves some recognition as well.
That's nothing new, flea markets and yard sales have been and still are wide open to fence goods. I would say Amazon FBA is actually upping the bar on selling stolen goods its kind of a lot of work. Plus you have to pay FBA fees and the Amazon commissions.
If it's actually organized crime, then they can be prosecuted under RICO statutes, which allows for much stronger sentencing than shoplifting ever would have. Robbery is one of the 35 crimes included under the "racketeering" umbrella.
I think it's okay to mention the effect Amazon is having without blaming them. Ultimately online person-to-person trading is making fencing items easier and the people buying probably don't know they are purchasing stolen items. Amazon isn't the thesis, but it is disrupting the stolen goods market in the same way automoboles and highways lead to a spike in bank robbery.
I grew up in a poor area and we had a neighborhood fence. Let's call him 'Casey' since that was his name. Everyone knew Casey was selling stolen items and there was sort of a joke in the town about getting a 'Casey discount'. It sounds like Casey is probably operating an Amazon store now.
If each item had a unique id. And the stores could indicate unique ids that are stolen. The. Amazon & eBay could monitor and prevent stolen merchandise
A misdemeanor can still get up to 6 to 12 months in jail depending on if it is a gross misdemeanor or an aggravated misdemeanor, so I’m not sure I buy the theory that the downgrade from felony in 2014 is why these shoplifters are not prosecuted.
Not to downplay the seriousness of theft, but there's something to be said about the scale. A few people working in an uncoordinated fashion is a crime problem; a structured group essentially working in symbiosis with a retailer's systems (and its blindspots) sounds more like a system design issue on the community and company level. Why do these people need or even want to steal so much? How can a company sustain these kinds of losses? It seems like there are inefficiencies to consider from several vantage points.
For many customers that eliminates the only advantage of shopping at a brick & mortar store. If you have to ask store staff for everything then it's easier to shop online.
Cities are destroying their own business districts and losing sales tax revenue by refusing to enforce shoplifting laws.
I was trying to buy some allergy spray at CVS, and couldn't get anyone to unlock the case. So I left and ordered it online from Costco, at 1/3 the price.
Sadly a lot of the more risky chains do this pretty regularly. I was in a best buy a few years ago where almost everything was behind glass. I wonder what that does to the minds of locals shopping and feeling like they're always under lock and key. It can't be healthy.
"Pawnshop" is the wrong word. A "Pawnshop" takes your goods for collateral and loans you money. A "fence" is somebody who helps thieves sell stolen goods.
A pawnshop might be a front for fencing, but Amazon doesn't function as a pawnshop at all.
[This comment was a reaction to the title of this post, which was fortunately changed.]
They're not great places to take stolen goods either, at least not generically, for anything with a serial number or distinct characteristics. Every item that get's pawned or sold in a store goes into a searchable database like LeadsOnline [0]. My family owns a number of pawn shops and we got a very low number of stolen items, the most common was someone stealing from family.
100%. Pawnshops are basically high interest collateral loan shops. This is saying that Amazon is a fencing operation. But then again this has been a major use for eBay and similar as well.
It would be way too easy to scam them. Pawnshops need to validate the quality of the item and determine if it’s legit. Most Pawnshops will also sell on ebay.
This hardly a story about Amazon. It's a story of how Northern California's choice not to prosecute theft has resulted in a massive increase in criminal activity.
That CVS has to privately hire security in the face of $10 million/year of goods being brazenly looted out of its stores has little to do with any Amazon policy and more to do with the policies adopted by local district attorneys.
There's reasonable evidence that this is how the Sicilian Mafia started: lack of effective state enforcement of laws and property rights... Creating a situation where private security forces arise, offering protection from gangs of thieves and perhaps protection from the security force itself. Obviously, this is not what cvs is doing, but lack of effective law enforcement can lead to unusual and unexpected "solutions."
Large numbers without a comparison are difficult to understand. Is 10M a large or small number in this context?
CA has 1,180 CVS pharmacies. [0] Northern CA has 40% of CA pop. [1] Assuming regular distribution of CVSes in CA, there are 472 in Northern CA. 10M is 21k/store. Is that a lot? Not certain.
How much is it DAs vs cops just not wanting to do their job to prove what they said would happen is true?
Cops don’t always arrest based on the law, but what they feel like doing. See Oregon where they decided not to police proud boy protests and tend to arrest anti-white supremacist type protestors much more.
How much is it the cops found they can prove their own point? If I make a bet that I’ll get last in a race, I’ll run slower. If one claims some policy will slow them down and They don’t actually have an incentive to win, Then there’s a chance they’ll slow down to be right so people will do what They say in the future.
What incentive do cops have to arrest or charge theft when cops keep saying it’s CA laws that are causing thefts to rise? They can make themselves seem right by not arresting people.
Wake me when wage theft is prosecuted anywhere near as seriously as shoplifting. Both have been estimated to cost the economy around $40 billion per year in the US. (Simply search “shoplifting cost in us” or “wage theft cost in us” and find your favorite estimate. They’re surprisingly close.)
edit: I'd seen this mentioned recently, but hadn't realised it was a long running culture war thing so it had already been discredited by research years ago:
I wonder if the savings to society for police/court time is worth the increased cost of goods from shops paying for their own security? Will this become another barrier to entry for small businesses?
Any data to back up your claim (that rate of theft is positively caused by "less" prosecution)? Would like to see an analysis that controls for confounders as well (like effects from a pandemic).
"The judicial branch of California explains on its page about Prop 47 that the new law “reclassifies certain theft and drug possession offenses from felonies to misdemeanors.” Thanks to Prop 47, shoplifting offenses involving property valued at less than $950 are prosecuted as misdemeanors, not felonies, but they are still prosecuted. Such offenses are punishable by up to six months in county jail."
Get your facts straight before spreading disinformation.
That's a nice unattributed quote you've got there. Now for some actual data that say the exact opposite:
"The numbers show the prosecution rate for shoplifting cases involving a misdemeanor petty theft charge for a loss of $950 or less fell under [San Francisco DA Chesa] Boudin, from 70 percent under former District Attorney George Gascon in 2019 to 44 percent in 2020 and 50 percent as of mid-June
2021.
Prosecutors filed charges in 116 of 266 cases presented by police involving petty theft in 2020, compared to 450 of 647 cases in 2019, according to the data provided by the District Attorney’s Office."
It doesn't matter what the judicial branch says on paper. What matters is the process. In California, the decision to prosecute a misdemeanor must happen within 24 hours of that misdemeanor happening, otherwise it won't be pursued? Reclassifying something as a misdemeanor, when combined with other policy choices around misdemeanors, means that a fraction of them are actually prosecuted. So, you get your facts straight, please.
Also worth noting that California's felony threshold is still much lower than most states (i.e. it's easier to get charged with a felony), including conservative ones that are usually "tough on crime." And the Bay Area's cost of living is higher as well.
There are quite a lot of folks in this thread claiming that they are not prosecuted at all in SF. As in police don’t even bother showing up. I’m not living there so I’m not sure what the on-the-ground situation is, do you mean that this is not the case?
A friend of mine is a manager at a Safeway. He says a typical store might lose six figures worth of product in a year. In a bad neighborhood it's not uncommon to lose over a million dollars a year.
They hire security personnel, but people figure out that a) even when security catches you, they are not allowed to restrain you and b) the police do not respond to shoplifters (in certain jurisdictions they are not allowed to.
The stores are responsible for the cost of missing inventory - they credit it back to the manufacturers. Stores already run tight margins, so this cost ends up getting paid by reduced headcount at stores (except for security, if it's bad enough) and directly in prices.
And this is in the grocery space, where there's very little secondary market for the stolen goods!
Why are they not allowed to restrain a shoplifter? In Germany, that's covered by the "anyone's" right: if you see someone commit a crime, you can detain/restrain them until the police arrives. Some restrictions apply, like for example having to watch the crime yourself etc but for shop security staff it's enough rights
It's not necessarily that they can't legally do so, but it's against the policy of every single store. If you do so as an employee, you will most likely get fired. No amount of merchandise is worth risking an employees life. Healthcare is a mess over here, but we do generally have that part right.
Restraining a shoplifter could lead to liability issues for the employer. For example, if the shoplifter injures the employee, there's a workplace injury that goes on the OSHA record, you have an employee who is out for some amount of time, it could increase insurance rates, and it could lead to the employee getting shot if the shoplifter were particularly violent.
Additionally, if the shoplifter gets injured, they may sue the store for the injury they sustained.
Most of the US does allow a citizens arrest to be performed.
There’s zero incentive for anyone to do so. Best case scenario they get a pat on the back. Worst case scenario they get killed or permanently injured/disabled. There’s no reason to put your life on the line for a corporation that will put nothing on the line for you.
They're allowed in a legal sense, but the store often orders security not to physically intervene because of the potential legal liability if either party is injured.
In the US, we generally have "Shopkeeper's privilege", which lets shopkeepers detain a person reasonably suspected of shoplifting while an investigation happens. Usually that involves just calling the police, or taking their picture and telling them they're banned for life, and then letting them go.
I noticed my local Home Depot has done away with the security tag scanners at the front of the store, apparently in favor of a cluster of new cameras above all the exits. I wonder if we're headed for just having an AI watch everyone all the time in the store like the automatic-purchase grocery stores Amazon was setting up. Either that or they discovered that it was better for their bottom line to put real security around the power tools than bust people for stealing trivial things.
Ultimately high value things will get secured behind a clerk where you take a picture card of what you want to them.
Stores will use cameras and AI to build a comprehensive case against someone or group and then notify the police. That will be enough for a warrant etc...
Probably a startup or two in this space. I am sure home depot or CVS will invest in your series A.
My wife introduced me to the world of underground baby formula. It's frankly shocking how many people she knows who make money off of it (either shoplifting, Medicaid fraud, or as a way of converting WIC into cash).
Slightly adjacent, fighting credit card disputes feels the same way. A company can prove without a doubt that it's a legitimate charge, only to have the case go to pre-arbitration; which in many cases is too costly to fight without certainty of winning.
Boosting has been going on since the 90's in NYC. Back in the day i used to work on 34th/7th ave in NYC s selling leather jackets in a rinky-dink store about 500 square fee. The boosters came in groups some from Brooklyn some from uptown. They would boost across the street from Macy's and sell the stolen goods right across the street or on the streets. They would go store to small shops and sell Georgio armani , versace to the employees who worked there and to tourists on the streets ( those brands where hot back then) some boosters even started taking orders,. there were independent operators( not with the pack) and others who would roll with the pack. Each booster specialized in boosting a product. Some would only do designer clothing while others would lift electronics and they would sell to tourists on the street or store clerks working in shops, I even bought a nice Armani suite from them one day. They had figured out how to beat all security alarms in macy's and someone then figured out that you could return what you stole from Macy’s without a receipt during the holidays so boosters then started to return what they stole back to Macy’s and Macy’s would cut them a check for it. This was around 1995. Some boosters tried to lift stuff from the store I was working in and I had to go and stop them , one time we had throw down right in front of our store to get the leather jackets back. I even had to go run after a few. Macy’s security guards can’t do jack. The cops had more important things todo I guess. The boosters would grab and bag and just run out the door and into the train and vanish. They had some aluminum foil around the bag they put the stuff in so the alarms did not go off. They would go downtown. Uptown and after the city got to HOT they started going to the suburban malls. It was like a syndicate. I guess it’s still happening now.
I worked at a mall in the 90's in two different stores. One was a clothing store, and 'home shoppers' made up the majority of the thefts.
The way it works, is you 'place an order', and someone from the theft ring steals what you want, and in a few days you get your items at a discount from the 'home shopper'.
I remember my dad would buy some random clothing items from a friend of a friend who had things in the trunk of his car. I never thought much of it.
When I worked at JC Penny I then saw how it worked. You'd have random individual shoplifters (they'd leave all the tags and stuff from the clothes in the bathrooms or dressing rooms), or you'd have multiple shoplifters come in at once, fill their carts and then dash out the door, getaway car waiting for them.
Store security couldn't do much, if you tackled the people you'd get fired, so the best defense was to jam up the automatic doors with empty shopping carts, that way they could only leave with what they could fit in their hands.
It wasn't much different at the electronics store I worked at afterward. PC add-in cards would end up missing, empty boxes found in the appliances on the other end of the store, sliced open so they could be fished out the bottom. There go the new $300 3Dfx cards...
And the organized shoplifters came in at night, just before close. You'd have 5-6 people come in, and all head for the CD aisle. We'd page for customer assistance, and anyone still working in the store would head over. They'd fill their coats with CD's and again run out the door, getaway car waiting.
All you can do is get them on camera, record the description or license plate of the car, and let the police know, and let the other stores know. Our internal email system had a ongoing thread of the shoplifters they'd seen lately, because they would hit every store in the state.
Back in the old days, you asked for items the clerk got them and you paid. There was too much theft in the old days for open shelves.
Now we leave it open and trust - which has now been massively abused has expanded to fill that void.
The clerks were labor intensive, but the similar robots to used in Amazon warehouses could serve people at a screen, the order assembled, paid and then handed to the client - much like online order and deliver - but in person.
These huge costs will force this. Small stores will go to the old one at a time model service - most do this with cigarettes and liquor. It is a fine tuning of the retail chain that I feel will inexorable be forced upon us.
Readit News
The story isn't about people selling stolen goods on Amazon. It's about organized theft operations. One way to stop theft is to reduce the ability to sell stolen goods, but that infringes on ownership rights of a large number of people that want to sell things online. I'm sure large corporations would love it if you can't buy their goods second hand.
At the end of the day, protecting property rights is a job for the state. Since it sounds its being organized, the criminal organization might be exploiting recent changes in sentencing and prosecution:
> Retail investigators blame changes in sentencing laws in some states for an uptick in thefts. In California, a 2014 law downgraded the theft of less than $950 worth of goods to a misdemeanor from a felony. Target recently reduced its operating hours in five San Francisco stores, citing rising thefts.
Disagree that crime in your neighborhood has dropped? Just because your car has been broken into and your neighbor got robbed doesnt mean there's a trend. Anecdotes arent data. Do you have a source for that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
But the nice neighborhoods are hiring private security and in some cases threatening tax revolt
Deleted Comment
Funny how that works.
I notice it’s WSJ complaining.
More “government is inept” sentiment to justify private armies.
With the American System each year failing a larger and larger percentage of the population, while the upper elites continue to hoard wealth and starve the government, then it makes more and more poor people turn to illegal means to make money.
Much like drug gangs in the inner city. However this will also turn into the nasty spiral of gang-controlled neighborhoods chasing out legit economic activity and becoming even more poor.
What we need is a decent civil society. But America is an oligarchy and they've figured out how to use social media to block any meaningful populist progressive reform by organizing a sufficient opposition with astroturfing and fake news.
I keep thinking of this event that happened to me in the UK, where laws are equally useless at preventing theft, and staff are just powerless to do anything about it. I chased down a shoplifter. I cornered him in an alley. He stopped, looked at me, and this brief conversation took place. (and nobody ever believes me, but I don't care; this really did happen)
Him: What are you doing?
Me: I'm chasing you
Him: why?
Me: Because you're a fucking thief!
Him: (confused)...nobody's ever done that before.
Me: (shocked) ... well, I AM, so fucking run!
He dropped the bag (which contained mostly expensive meat and cheese and some other expensive-ish items - apparently really common theft targets) - and ran off. I took the bag back to the store.
Now, I didn't give a shit about a 100 pound loss to Tesco, but if we've completely given up on the rule of law, I'm not sure that's a society I'm happy to live in.
Here's an excellent clip about a famous criminal living free in Seattle that happily expounds on his illegal activity: https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=868
So it creates a situation where you can walk in the store, grab what you want, and then walk out with out having the police called or anyone legally allowed to stop you.
> In TX can You Legally Shoot & Kill a Shoplifter? The short answer is…not unless they somehow injure you in the process of committing the theft, making it a robbery. “During the process of committing the theft” would include while trying to escape with the property... One thing that is UNIQUE to Texas is the ability to use deadly force to protect property, even if you are not in fear for your life.
Even though I doubt CVS security guards are trained the shoot shoplifters, the preception that this is a possibility would deter low level criminals tasked with shoplifting
http://legas.legrandelaw.com/criminal-justice/in-tx-can-you-...
We have 20 year old people who end up in jail for life because they assassinated someone. It's insane, they're doing it for just 20000 euro!
So, if your crew stole $10,000 worth of stuff over the past year, you’d be looking at a $10k theft charge even if you individually only stole $50 of merchandise.
Deleted Comment
I grew up in a poor area and we had a neighborhood fence. Let's call him 'Casey' since that was his name. Everyone knew Casey was selling stolen items and there was sort of a joke in the town about getting a 'Casey discount'. It sounds like Casey is probably operating an Amazon store now.
Cities are destroying their own business districts and losing sales tax revenue by refusing to enforce shoplifting laws.
I was trying to buy some allergy spray at CVS, and couldn't get anyone to unlock the case. So I left and ordered it online from Costco, at 1/3 the price.
A pawnshop might be a front for fencing, but Amazon doesn't function as a pawnshop at all.
[This comment was a reaction to the title of this post, which was fortunately changed.]
[0] https://www.leadsonline.com/main/index.php
Deleted Comment
This hardly a story about Amazon. It's a story of how Northern California's choice not to prosecute theft has resulted in a massive increase in criminal activity.
That CVS has to privately hire security in the face of $10 million/year of goods being brazenly looted out of its stores has little to do with any Amazon policy and more to do with the policies adopted by local district attorneys.
CA has 1,180 CVS pharmacies. [0] Northern CA has 40% of CA pop. [1] Assuming regular distribution of CVSes in CA, there are 472 in Northern CA. 10M is 21k/store. Is that a lot? Not certain.
0. https://www.scrapehero.com/largest-pharmacies-in-the-us/
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_California
Cops don’t always arrest based on the law, but what they feel like doing. See Oregon where they decided not to police proud boy protests and tend to arrest anti-white supremacist type protestors much more.
How much is it the cops found they can prove their own point? If I make a bet that I’ll get last in a race, I’ll run slower. If one claims some policy will slow them down and They don’t actually have an incentive to win, Then there’s a chance they’ll slow down to be right so people will do what They say in the future.
What incentive do cops have to arrest or charge theft when cops keep saying it’s CA laws that are causing thefts to rise? They can make themselves seem right by not arresting people.
Given the article is about the effects of not prosecuting shoplifting, time to wake up?
edit: I'd seen this mentioned recently, but hadn't realised it was a long running culture war thing so it had already been discredited by research years ago:
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...
Deleted Comment
Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.
"The judicial branch of California explains on its page about Prop 47 that the new law “reclassifies certain theft and drug possession offenses from felonies to misdemeanors.” Thanks to Prop 47, shoplifting offenses involving property valued at less than $950 are prosecuted as misdemeanors, not felonies, but they are still prosecuted. Such offenses are punishable by up to six months in county jail."
Get your facts straight before spreading disinformation.
"The numbers show the prosecution rate for shoplifting cases involving a misdemeanor petty theft charge for a loss of $950 or less fell under [San Francisco DA Chesa] Boudin, from 70 percent under former District Attorney George Gascon in 2019 to 44 percent in 2020 and 50 percent as of mid-June 2021.
Prosecutors filed charges in 116 of 266 cases presented by police involving petty theft in 2020, compared to 450 of 647 cases in 2019, according to the data provided by the District Attorney’s Office."
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/data-shows-chesa-boudin-pros...
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/10/felony-threshol...
They hire security personnel, but people figure out that a) even when security catches you, they are not allowed to restrain you and b) the police do not respond to shoplifters (in certain jurisdictions they are not allowed to.
The stores are responsible for the cost of missing inventory - they credit it back to the manufacturers. Stores already run tight margins, so this cost ends up getting paid by reduced headcount at stores (except for security, if it's bad enough) and directly in prices.
And this is in the grocery space, where there's very little secondary market for the stolen goods!
Then the store closes, then you get a food desert.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festnahme#Jedermann-Festnahme
Restraining a shoplifter could lead to liability issues for the employer. For example, if the shoplifter injures the employee, there's a workplace injury that goes on the OSHA record, you have an employee who is out for some amount of time, it could increase insurance rates, and it could lead to the employee getting shot if the shoplifter were particularly violent.
Additionally, if the shoplifter gets injured, they may sue the store for the injury they sustained.
Most of the US does allow a citizens arrest to be performed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_arrest
Stores will use cameras and AI to build a comprehensive case against someone or group and then notify the police. That will be enough for a warrant etc...
Probably a startup or two in this space. I am sure home depot or CVS will invest in your series A.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28035458
In Costco's favor, they don't have a lot of valuable things that you can just walk with that aren't just a cardboard voucher.
https://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-drugs-2013-1/...
The way it works, is you 'place an order', and someone from the theft ring steals what you want, and in a few days you get your items at a discount from the 'home shopper'.
I remember my dad would buy some random clothing items from a friend of a friend who had things in the trunk of his car. I never thought much of it.
When I worked at JC Penny I then saw how it worked. You'd have random individual shoplifters (they'd leave all the tags and stuff from the clothes in the bathrooms or dressing rooms), or you'd have multiple shoplifters come in at once, fill their carts and then dash out the door, getaway car waiting for them.
Store security couldn't do much, if you tackled the people you'd get fired, so the best defense was to jam up the automatic doors with empty shopping carts, that way they could only leave with what they could fit in their hands.
It wasn't much different at the electronics store I worked at afterward. PC add-in cards would end up missing, empty boxes found in the appliances on the other end of the store, sliced open so they could be fished out the bottom. There go the new $300 3Dfx cards...
And the organized shoplifters came in at night, just before close. You'd have 5-6 people come in, and all head for the CD aisle. We'd page for customer assistance, and anyone still working in the store would head over. They'd fill their coats with CD's and again run out the door, getaway car waiting.
All you can do is get them on camera, record the description or license plate of the car, and let the police know, and let the other stores know. Our internal email system had a ongoing thread of the shoplifters they'd seen lately, because they would hit every store in the state.